Reality tours to the world's political hot spots offer a change from the usual mundane vacation

It is not every day that a California software engineer gets to grill a gathering of masked Zapatista rebels about their method of trash collection. That an Iowa State professor can draw them out about the "dreams and hopes" of their children. That a New Jersey high school teacher can query them on how they cope with paramilitary threats, or that a Seattle grant writer can talk to them about women in combat.

But so it was, deep in the cloud forest of southern Mexico, as 15 members of the town council of San Andres Sakamch'en, bedecked in ribboned sombreros and...